DHH's "AI shed" idea got me thinking about getting a small $5–10/month VPS. I'm a Linux guy and have on many points of my life have a personal server. So I like the idea of having something always on, but I’m not sure the maintenance is worth it when most things can just run on my laptop. That said, I tend to do things myself and only later realize I could have automated or delegated them, so I may have a blind spot here. If you have a cheap VPS or mini PC, what actually ended up being useful long-term? Anything that saved enough time or replaced enough subscriptions to justify keeping it around?

Ten years ago I was 19 and traveling through East Africa, and I spent a summer in Ibumila, a village in the Njombe highlands of Tanzania. There's no school in the village. The nearest one is a boarding school an hour away that costs a few hundred dollars a year, which is out of reach for most families there and was about two weeks of summer job money for me. The daughter of the family I stayed with, Anwarite, was 11. I offered to pay her fees and told myself I'd keep paying as long as she wanted to keep going. This summer she graduated from the University of Dar es Salaam with a degree in Language Studies, and last week she told me she'd been accepted into a Master of Arts in Swahili program there. Roughly 2% of people from Njombe ever finish a university degree. Her goal is to get a PhD and then to bring it back to the region. Her entire 18-month master's program (tuition, registration, fees, books, supplies) comes to 3,060,000 TSh, about $1,161. Since this worked out, I kept adding students as I could afford to, and in 2021 I registered it as a 501(c)(3), the Tanzania Education Project. It supports five students from Ibumila now, school fees and healthcare. I kept it small while I was finishing my PhD because I didn't want commitments I couldn't personally guarantee for a decade; I've since started a postdoc, so it feels like the right time to grow past my own paycheck. The long-term goal is that every kid in the village has access to education and healthcare. I sometimes think of this project as a slow experiment. How much could the village itself change over someone's lifetime if the kids have access to education? https://tanzaniaeducationproject.org/ is the website. Nobody takes a salary, and aside from bank fees the money goes to the students. If anyone wants to fund Anwarite's master's specifically, it's here: https://www.gofundme.com/f/send-anwarite-to-her-masters-prog... Happy to answer any questions or take any tips you all might have about doing this sort of thing.

The two mainstream arguments are the extremes, because that's how our modern society rolls. It's either that there is an AI bubble that will crash, or that a rogue ASI will kill us all. What about the third possibility? What if GPT 3.5 -> Sonnet 3.5 -> Opus 4.5 -> Astra / Opus 5.5 just keeps going for the next few years? Based on my experience, that will eat all software and software-related meetings. Once lab researchers focus on fields other than software, they will eat those nearly as quickly. This feels like the real contrarian position in 2026. What does the US economy, which is >70% service-based, look like in the next 3 to 5 years, if this happens? Does a couple labs having control of that percentage of the GDP make an economy? What if it happens too quickly? Is this the real reason why they are talking about "pacing the frontier" all of a sudden? Maybe this impossible "pacing" is due to the fact that the labs' own economists pointed out that collapsing your country's economy might not be a good idea? What does unemployment look like in the next few years in this scenario, in the USA?

I am a developer of https://www.photopea.com, a popular photo editor that runs in a web browser. Many people are asking AI models to take the Javascript code from my website, remove all ads from it, and they publish such a "new product" on Github for everyone to download. There exist tens of such repositories on Github. I want my website to be the only source of a stable version of my program Photopea. I even received emails from people complaining about something in Photopea, and it took several emails to figure out that they are not using Photopea.com (so it ruins my reputation a little). I reported it to Github on the 4th of September 2026: https://www.photopea.com/g/XKoqqIGv Today, a month later, I received this response: Thank you for submitting a DMCA takedown notice. We've reviewed the information you've provided, and based on the facts presented to us, we're unable to confirm a violation of 17 U.S. Code § 1201. What do you think I could do? Do you think I should look for a lawyer to deal with it outside the digital world? I really doubt that a real person ever looked at my report, and they probably send this response automatically to 99% of people.

Could you briefly introduce the reason or what it's used for?

I got an email this morning inviting me to purchase a Steam Machine for $1049. It's all AMD-based, 16GB DDR5 and 8GB VRAM with 512GB storage. They're about 4x more powerful than a Steam Deck. Con: Since it's Linux-based I think online games with anti-cheat won't work, which seems like a significant downside in terms of utility. Is this a decent deal compared to building my own gaming rig? p.s. I don't really care about the size footprint.

Intuit has a market cap of ~$80B and there are others. Intuit aggressively lobbies against free tax filing or automated tax filing by IRS, which gets all the info anyways.

I've been having a hard time finding a solution. Is there really no commercialized model that I can feed in a reference sound and text instruction and get another sound out? Right now having a multimodal inputs to image or text output is a commodotized, solved problem. IE you can put a prompt for some image and use a reference image to guide the model on what you want. After all, a picture is worth a thousand words right? Ive also used a text and audio input in order to get a text description or classification out. I cannot for the life of me find a solution for Audio + text -> Audio My usecase is that I'm trying to generate new sound effects based on a source that doesn't have that many clean examples and thought this would be just another solved workflow but I'm not finding much. Tried elevenlabs SFX but it's only text->audio and without the reference, it's hard to guide with just text and recreate a sound with any accuracy. I tried the Stable Audio 3 model which is supposed to do what I want but the results were terrible. This modality seems to be stuck where image generation was in 2016. Is there something else or is this just not a common need?

I write a golf blog. Recently, it's been getting a nontrivial amount of attention from a very niche section of the nerd-golf community. I've been getting a small number of emails and message from people because of this. This is how it has been going: Me: Oh, this is a nice email. Wait, something seems off. Let me check this in Pangram... Oh, 100% AI predicted. I respond: Hey, thanks for the note. Just FYI, Pangram doesn't really like your writing style. Them: Ahh, you got me. I use AI to help me write. Blah, blah... --- I really don't know what to do here. I still don't know if I'm talking to a human. If you are messaging me because you like my writing and you're using AI to write these short messages for you, I don't know what to tell you. Please stop. It takes two minutes to write a quick message... I really don't care if there are typos or it's a bit awkward. But if you're using AI to facilitate this I'm not going to know if I'm ever talking to a person! And, there is a nontrivial chance I'm going to report your account for spam, which I really don't want to do if you're a human and a fan of my writing. Using AI for these kinds of short messages is poisoning the well in ways that many people don't seem to understand. It's the strangest feeling... getting a flattering note, and ending up not even knowing if anyone actually read my blog in the first place.

Is anyone working on a positive text origin verification standard? Everyday it gets harder to distinguish between AI generated content and human generated content. This will never really work on the side of the labs but for people looking to actively prove they're the ones that wrote something there's an incentive to voluntarily collect that evidence. Is anyone working on this?

And if so, could that explain some of the negativity towards speculative and crazy ideas?

This was recently announced by Dr. Berkan from New York. LLMs meeting ontologies, quite exciting to see such new advancement. OLMApp https://olmapp.ai/more.html

Do you or anybody around you use the old term, the new term or both?

Back in 2024 there were a lot of news regarding quantum computers and even some claims of quantum supremacy, with famous bloggers like Scott Aaronson having very heated arguments online on whether those claims were real or not. We are now approaching the end of 2026 and it feels like not much has happened since then but I was curious to hear from people working on this field.

On an older but perfectly serviceable PC with 16GB RAM, Amazon.com idles at 20% CPU and will spike to 80-100% when scrolling. The screen tears and typing sometimes takes seconds before characters appear. This is hilariously bad and a harbinger of the ongoing decline of the industry right now.

Hi all. In the world of AI I might be late to the party, but hey, nothing ventured, nothing gained. I have worked as a programmer for some years, but I still feel absolutely incapable of designing a highly scalable system and in a way that’s cost effective (without wasting money unnecessarily). I have read system design books and designing data intensive applications. They are useful but I don’t feel like I can “problem solve” effectively in this domain. For instance, I got asked in an interview how to scale a web crawler and I froze. Ask me how google can give an AI overview so quickly and I wouldn’t know where to start. Most of what I do at work is adding new features and fixing bugs. Companies often dictate things like “we’re a Kubernetes, Postgres and redis shop”. For others that have had to learn these skills without learning from someone at your company, how did you do it? And how do you approach solving these problems? I understand this is a vague question but I’d appreciate any sort of pointers. Even if you’ll be telling me “the obvious”, that will just help me to trust that advice more (I struggle to trust my own judgement). Thanks.

To keep up at work, I have to use AI - in turn, I have found that I just have tmux with lazygit, perhaps neovim to check on a file out of curiosity and my agent(s) open. I only ever use my IDE to launch a local instance of what I'm working on, none of the features or plugins really matter anymore. I wonder if the future of IDEs is bleak.

As Hacker News is filled with people who are well versed it IT, I would like to ask readers to share their personal backup strategies for their preferred operating system and what tools they use. Also, for those willing to share, are you performing full system backups or just backing up your important files? Thank you!

Do you think we're trading off model size, and model capacity, for compute? Take looped transformers, which GPT-6 Astra is rumored to be based on. They increase compute while keeping the model's capacity almost fixed. So my question is, if we had an infinitely large model (with also infinite capacity) and of course infinite compute, would we still need CoT or looped transformers? Could we have a model where the reasoning happens directly within a single forward pass? I think so. What we do today is just a trade-off imposed by the computing power we have available.

I see certain groups (e.g.,farmers) periodically protest in France but high school?

I play a few word games every day - Wordle, connections, crossword - but I feel I need to look at non-word games to keep the brain agile. Looking for ideas.

I can't complain about Opus 5.5, more than extracted my money's worth out of it but the final stages require pen-testing and Claude's masters stomp on it every time it tries to help do security reviews [cyber]. Ever so often it sneaks in a security fix. Even found a race condition in haproxy by mistake and Claude took it upon itself to find the crash string. That went horribly bad. Each time they try to up-sell Mythos and say I have to go through a verification program that I am not permitted to go through. Aside from the uncensored Qwen forks, which frontier models can do extensive code security reviews, security fixes? Ideally something close to the quality of the NCC Group. This is for my own hobby craft. Maybe this does not exist and that is fine too.

There was a time I would come to HN to get some respite from the depressing state of reality. Ukraine war or climate crisis would drive me to despair, and I'd try to get a little endorphin rush by dodging those same topics here and reading about neat things people build or cool new technologies or products. The light has gone out lately. I can't blame AI for all of it. there are a lot of AI stories, sure - but something else has changed. Even the show hn section doesn't sparkle anymore. That seem to be all libraries for doing complex stuff. Like everyone is pivoting to deliver more complex work in the face of vibe coding. Where's the fun stuff? Where's the joy?

I've been struggling to put into words what I want from my relationships and began asking my friends what their answers were, and so now I ask you.

The text says: "We're sorry but it appears that there has been an internal server error while processing your request. Our engineers have been notified and are working to resolve the issue."

Ive started to think about it lately, a google search just doesn't yield a satisfiable result. What do you guys think ? How many people are actually against AI? Sometimes it feels like the majority are starting to be skeptical, but maybe that's just the environment im surrounded by.

My wife tried to convince me to buy a printer, she said that it could be useful to print school related stuff for the kids and I was kind of surprised because I have the feeling that it's not needed anymore? Even if we talk about school, today the communication with the teacher is done through an App, so I'm not sure it's going to go back (my kids are 6, if that matters). I also have a printer at the office which I have to go every day and she asked me to print stuff like twice, so I'm kind of curious about what's the status of home printing? PS - when I need to print photos, I use a service that prints in a proper photographic paper and size to frame. I do this like twice a year.